I know that when people move to places with significantly higher locations (like many places in Colorado), it often takes them a while to adjust to the thinner air - they’ll feel fatigued, short of breath, etc.
What about the reverse? Do people used to living in higher elevations experience any sort of “oxygen high” when they go to places of significantly lower elevation?
I go to school at 7500 feet, give or take a couple hundred. ‘Home’ is about 5 feet above sea level.
I wouldn’t say it’s a high, per se - it’s not like getting stoned or anything. It is, however, noticable. Also, if you want to feel more or less like superman, I recommend the following:
Considering that even at high altitudes your blood oxygen saturation is likely to be close to 95-98%, no you won’t get an oxygen high by going to sea level and taking it to 96-99%. Incidentally, these stupid “oxygen bars” won’t make you high either, unless you really are already hypoxic. In which case, you should probably get professional medical help.
However, like NinjaChick already said, living at higher altitudes will give you certain adaptations like extra red blood cells that will give you better aerobic performance. You’ll feel it in exercise, but you won’t get high sitting in a lounge chair, staring at your hands, eating Dorritos, and exclaiming, “sea-level, dudes, seeeeaaaa leveeelll…”
My citeless recollection is that NinjaChick is right.
For people not born and raised at altitude, being there for extended periods results in the generation of more red blood cells to compensate for the comparative lack of oxygen.
For people born at high altitude, larger lung capacity is a common adaptation…
Again, no cite… Just going on faded memories of documentaries…
I live at 11,200. I don’t notice any difference when I visit my In-laws in Pittsburgh.
My Wife runs marathons, she has said that the training at altitude doesn’t seem to give here any real ‘edge’.
I know living in houses at high altitutes is popular among cross-country skiers here in Norway. I have no idea if there is any proven effect to it though.
Really? I spend a month or so a year up in your neck of the woods. Our house is at 10,700. After a few weeks there hiking, biking, skiing, whatever is in season, I feel a huge difference for several days after returning to flatland. My experience is much more like NinjaChick’s; for a few days after coming downhill, I have much higher aerobic fitness. Since I maintain about the same level of activity all the time, the increase is not completely attributable to just the workouts I got at altitude.
We talked about this some in this thread.
Yes, going to hugher altitude will definitely cause physical adaptations like losing sodium-bicarbonate in your urine to make your blood more basic and buffered against potential acidosis causing physical activity and you’ll also have more erythropoetin (EPO/dope) which will gradually raise your red blood cells over the course of a few weeks, and all of these adaptations will give you better aerobic performance, but they won’t give you an “oxygen high” like the OP was asking, because they don’t exist. When you’re sitting around, doing nothing, you won’t feel any difference unless you’ve got serious medical problems like CHF, COPD, etc.
Will this increase in aerobic performance give you better performance? Maybe. If you also train at these higher altitudes, you aren’t going to put as much actual stress into your muscles so they’ll tend to atrophy a bit compared to what they were at sea-level. For cycling, this makes a big difference, but for a sport like running, it’s easy to have all the muscle-mass you’ll ever need to be competitive at a top level in the sport (sprinters excepted of course). Competitive marathon runners don’t have huge or even particularly large legs because being really thin helps and it’s a highly aerobic activity.
This has given rise to the motto, “Live high, train low.”